Companies like Facebook and Twitter make billions harvesting our data and selling it to advertisers. If this monetization of our private lives isn't abhorrent enough, these services are also bad for our kids. When it first emerged, social media was a revelation. It was suddenly trivial to keep in touch with folks we don't see often, and used well, it can be an effective networking tool. The problem, as I see it, is the advent of smartphones has made it all too easy to obsessively check

It's nice to be able to share notes across devices and operating systems. Sometimes I email myself, but for me, that tends to get a bit messy. I tried Evernote and it seems nice, but there's no native Linux client. Luckily I found Simplenote. I have it installed on Ubuntu, iOS and MacOS and it's working great on all of them. Things I like: It's free It's available on most platforms It has an attractive uniform feel across devices Things to note: I had a few

I've got an idea for a mobile app. It will be called "4:33" in honour of the John Cage composition. Like the John Cage composition, it won't have any actual content. It will merely show a blank white screen for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, during which you listen to the sounds going on around you. It would be amazing to have 30 people on a train seemingly glued to their phones but in actuality deeply tuned into their environment.

I recently read The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. It's a short book and a bit old (1972), but I found it to have a lot of good insight about how we cripple ourselves by trying too hard to perform. Gallwey makes frequent reference to our two "selves", who he refers to as Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is our ego and the narrator in our head. Self 2 is our instinctual self and has no voice. Self 2 has an

One of the reasons I prefer Ghost to Wordpress is the ease of backing up: copy /var/www/ghost and you're done. Well, that's not always correct. That method works fine if your installation uses an SQLite3 database. Some installations (like mine) use MySQL. I'll show a way to back up the MySQL database too. You can find the database your installation uses by looking in /var/www/ghost/config.js. Note: If you use these instructions, I recommend ensuring your backups work by testing them